The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank has taken a 30% stake in Bayfront Infrastructure Management. Clifford Capital, with the backing of the government of Singapore, has the other 70%. They have created Bayfront (with a combined capitalization of $180 million) to mobilize a pool of infrastructure investors in the expectation thatRead More

The CFA Institute, in conjunction with the African Stock Exchanges Association (ASEA), has put together a book on the challenges and opportunities in the African capital markets. In Africa as elsewhere, fortune favors the bold. For example—and this is not an example from the ASEA and CFA Institute’s book—the EnkoRead More

The Alternative Investment Management Association first opened a branch in Canada in 2003. In recent days, AIMA has posted a report on what it calls the “landscape.” It doesn’t mean the Rockies. It means the lay of the land for alternative investments in that country. AIMA’s report looks at aRead More

An arm of Brookfield Asset Management, Brookfield Infrastructure, announced that it is leading a group of investors to buy Genesee & Wyoming for a cash payment of $112 per share, a premium of nearly 40% over the pre-announcement stock price. This is a big infrastructure play. G&W is a freightRead More

A recent study of public employee retirement systems in the United States reaches conclusions, that, after a fair amount of “grey tsunami” alarmism in recent years, sound reassuring. The study, based on a recent survey of system managements conducted by the National Conference of Public Employee Retirement Systems (NCPERS) inRead More

Two scholars affiliated with the Centre for International Governance Innovation, Waterloo, Canada, have taken a look at the future of green bonds, that is, bonds whose proceeds are employed to fund environmental initiatives. The paper, by Olaf Weber and Vasundhara Saravade, begins with a guesstimate as to the amount ofRead More

A London-headquartered specialist consultant, bFinance, has prepared a report on the trends that have emerged over the last decade in the way both investors and managers think about the real assets in portfolios. There are, the paper says, three trends at work. First, investors are becoming both more sophisticated andRead More

KPMG has posted a new paper looking at the role of real assets (defined as “anything where there is a tangible/physical asset being traded”) within a portfolio, with a focus on opportunities for U.K. based institutional investors, especially pension schemes. It begins with a brief survey of the field. RealRead More

In February of this year, the Economist Intelligence Unit surveyed 200 senior asset managers and institutional investor executives to learn what factors are most important in the way they make their decisions. Several different types of institution were involved, including hedge funds, private equity firms, insurance companies, and nonprofits. Also,Read More

Willis Towers Watson (NASDAQ: WLTW) recently posted its Global Alternatives Survey. WLTW is a consultancy with a long history, roots going back to 1828, and that now has 40,000 employees serving clients in 140 countries. The gist of its new report is that the alternatives asset industry has grown toRead More

A new study by EDHECinfra (EDHEC’s infrastructure institute based in Singapore), has a striking point of view on the whole “listed infrastructure” sector, which it says is based on the “fallacy of composition.” In economics and in logic, the term “fallacy of composition” refers to the general prejudice that ifRead More

PWC and the Urban Land Institute have jointly issued a report on “emerging trends in real estate” around the globe, which stresses that real estate’s attraction as an investment, even as a cross-border investment, has held up notwithstanding unprecedented levels of concern about geopolitics. The “global drift back to domesticRead More

The Global Commission on the Economy and Climate has issued a new report urging governments and major financial institutions to “scale up and shift investment to sustainable infrastructure as a fundamental strategy….” The report, The Sustainable Infrastructure Imperative, has no force as law or policy anywhere, but it may signalRead More

Preqin, the multinational data and consulting firm, has looked at the second quarter and found it was, for private capital fundraising … slow. So was the quarter before it. Together they made up the first half of 2016, in which the funds closed in the world of private capital globallyRead More

Intuitively, the problem with valuing the debt issued by an private SPE in an illiquid infrastructure project is this: the free cash flows of the SPE aren't easily observed. So how does one go about deriving their present value? Read More

Infrastructure is a perpetual investment, whether it's rebuilding old, existing underpinnings in developed markets or building the foundations that turn an emerging nation into a developing one. Preqin looks at this lesser known investment that underpins many alternative portfolios.Read More